Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 15:02:05 +0200 From: kurt@pinboard.com To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: installation docu update Message-ID: <20020825150205.A88846@pinboard.com>
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Hi there! I'd have a suggestion for an additional item in the FreeBSD installation docs. Some of the installations I do are via serial ports on machines which are on the other side of the world, connecting from one machine at that site via null-modem cable to the machine to be installed. 2.12.1 Installing FreeBSD on a System without a Monitor or Keyboard (http://www.freeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-advanced.html) does a good job of explaining how such an installation can be done. It does, however, require some personnel to insert boot floppies. I was looking for a way to avoid this if the target system already had an old version of FreeBSD running. It was not a big problem getting pretty close, but for a long time I failed due to minor steps. Here are the instructions of how to do it. 1) make sure you can access the target machine via serial cables 2) from the installation CDROM or by ftp from an FreeBSD mirror get the boot floppy boot.flp onto the target machine (cp /cdrom/floppies/boot.flp /tmp/) 3) configure a vnode disk to access the contents of boot.flp (vnconfig -e vn0c /tmp/boot.flp) 4) mount the vnode disk (mount -o ro /dev/vn0c /mnt) 5) move the whole /boot/ directory of the old installation (mv /boot /ori.boot) 6) move the file-system-table of the old installation (mv /etc/fstab /etc/ori.fstab) 7) move the kernel of the old installation (mv /kernel /ori.kernel) 8) copy the contents of the boot image to the root partition of the target machine ( cd /mnt tar cf - * | (cd /; tar xvf -) ) 9) optionally the temporary mount and the vnode disk can be unconfigured again ( cd /tmp umount /mnt vnconfig -u /dev/vn0c ) 10) go to the newly created /boot/ directory and set the option to use the first serial port as console ( cd /boot echo "set console=comconsole" >loader.rc.new cat loader.rc >>loader.rc.new mv loader.rc.new loader.rc ) 11) you're now ready to boot into the installation routine (shutdown -r now) 12) do the installation as usual, via the serial console 13) at the end of the installation you _must_ add an user account which is a member of the group wheel, otherwise you won't have a user to login on the serial port and su to root 14) before getting out of the installation routines completely and rebooting the system go to Configure -> TTY's and adjust the line starting with ttyd0 (1st serial port) so you can login via the serial port in case something with the network is not yet fine: old: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" dialup off secure new: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure Good luck! -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- : Kurt@pinboard.com http://www.pinboard.com/ business : : http://kurt.www.pinboard.com/ private : ---------------------------------------------------------------------- : Unix and Internet Specialist : : PGP fingerprint C34E BCD4 BA8B 1337 14FE 116C 2657 FFAC 08B9 BFC7 : ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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